Smoke and Mirrors supply system (No step back)

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Fighting in North Africa, it's extremely difficult to maintain good supply. I was building a large railroad network from the port in Alexandria to the border, and the best I could do was 90% with about 11 garrison units and one cavalry. Looking at the issue, it appears the rails to the front don't actually do much without the supply depot. Despite putting Alexandria to extreme motorized, the hub couldn't reach

Maybe this is a silly suggestion, but maybe rails could enhance the range of a hub? Basically carting supplies to the end of the line and unloading for further transport after.

They do, in a way. Having a max-level railway connection from capital -> hub, increases the range of that hub considerably. Having railways themselves propagate supply is not something we will do, though.
 
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It seems that the lack of information on how supply exactly functions and affects units, possibly combined with lower quality divisions as templates, doctrines, and tanks have all been changed, has created an environment where nobody knows why things aren't feeling right for them and they don't have a way to fix it.

Nobody is accustomed to units being in low supply because prior to this update that was essentially suicide, so when its seen now its very scary. That means a player's first reaction is to fix supply because they expect their units to be suffering immensely. Yet penalties are different and difficult to figure out in game, particularly as its difficult to figure out if the situation is getting worse. This creates more incentive to fix supply ASAP. Players go to form a plan, but with the new mechanics players (me) don't know if I need to be upgrading railways, building a new hub, motorizing a hub, or concentrating my forces to take one.

The last choice is especially bad as a player can't give AI good fallback or soft retreat lines, so you just feel stuck in crappy supply.

Consider as well some illogical issues. I imagined that railways would give some supply both because in extreme cases trains can stop and offload supply anywhere they like irl, and because railways are needed to have supply in hubs. It stands to reason that following a rail directly from your hub to an enemy hub would maintain decent levels of supply as you have a literal direct line between your advancing forces and their supply hub. That does not appear to be the case and instead creates more confusion. I felt this one a lot when trying to push Montepellier in southern France as Italy, I just couldn't get enough supply despite having infrastructure at my back.

In the confusion of how penalties have changed, how out of supply is too out of supply, and how to get supply in the first place - the issue of strategic and tactical level rails has been introduced. I don't know how to whether I need to upgrade a railway between 2 supply hubs or whether the entire line between my capital and a depot needs to be fixed.

This is particularly problematic as we're all accustomed to a bottleneck system. It feels like I need a max level railroad to my supply hubs because I'm not sure that a portion of the previous area's infrastructure is added to my incoming supply.

There's not enough information, but a lot of little warning symbols on my divisions.
 
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They do, in a way. Having a max-level railway connection from capital -> hub, increases the range of that hub considerably. Having railways themselves propagate supply is not something we will do, though.
Maybe you should add this information on the supply tooltip. I always thought building railways provide more supply but turns out its not.
 
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Yes, it's all make-believe. The trucks you build in production lines aren't even real trucks:

mev-10282926.jpg


Cheap jokes aside, though, I find myself... not caring too much, to be honest. I've dabbled with War in the East, which simulates the war on the eastern front a lot more granularly than HoI4 does, and most of the time I just felt indifferent to it. Either supply, ammunition, and fuel reached my units when they needed them, or they didn't. To me, what was important was making sure I had uninterrupted supply lines, and that rails were being repaired efficiently enough. Cutting enemies off from supply meant they lost their ability to fight after a couple of turns.

All this is simulated in HoI4. You have to repair infrastructure, you can outrun your supply lines, you can bomb enemy trains and rails (and the enemy can do the same to you!), and you can cut off the enemy from their rail-borne supplies. Thus, I don't really care if there's a real WITE-worthy logistics system or fairies and inflatable trucks under the hood. Call me a casual, but that's my take. There are some weird things that bother me, like how truck supply from a hub always requires exactly 25 or 50 (IIRC) trucks, and perhaps new rails are built a little too fast, but overall, I'm happy with the system.

Also keep in mind that many other operational games, like WITE, are turn-based, whereas HoI4 is "real-time", with one tick equalling one hour of game time, and additional calculations every midnight. WITE can get away with computations because players tolerate waiting for a new turn to load. I doubt we'd appreciate HoI4 locking up for several minutes every calendar day, or even if it was only once a game week.
 
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Thanks for the engagement, perspective and thoughts for the future Arheo, it's greatly appreciated :) I very much appreciate the work that's gone into the supply system, and think that it's a great foundation for the future, but that it also has a few rough edges (not least in the UI - I've gone into some detail in a few posts here). Some thoughts below - by far and away the biggest issue is that the game doesn't tell players what's going on - at one point in the tooltips it refers to a province-based supply ratio that as far as I can see is not visible to the player. That said, discouraging supply hub construction seems counter-productive to the overall design.

I'm not exaggerating when I say 60 minutes into NSB I almost shut down my game to go into the mod files and radically change the supply hub cost. I had to force myself to persist with the confusion of the base game. It's the first HoI4 (or Paradox) expansion I've ever come close to feeling like that with. Usually my modding is to add flavour, not to deal with what appeared (and still appears) like an system that's design couldn't cope with the UI. Now, to keep things in context, I think the new changes are great, and have heaps of potential :) I just think there are some design quirks/holes that when combined with the lack of information provided to the player make it far, far harder to work with than it should be.

Yes, and it is likely the cost for these will increase. Not to regular supply hub levels, though.

The issue with this is that you've made a "build-your-own" system approach to supply network, and you're now trying to stop people building their network (at least the most important parts of it). This leads to some pretty funny results, like me needing to build up a very high level of rail to Murmansk to supply a division one province away from a victory point and a railway - it's obtuse, un-fun and historically implausible. The back-stop of using state supply falls down because even divs in hubs draw state supply before hub supply, leaving very little for those out of range.

Yeah, these were the intended primary methods to solve issues.

The issue being that they don't work well enough, by any stretch, to do so - and they're completely pointless in areas like the Sinkiang border where there's no supply hub for ages.

We tried it both ways - without this, every war would becoming a tug of war over a specific point between two supply hubs.

As best I understand the design (and I need more time with it, so I could be wrong) the lack of railhead means your design still does this, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.

This is also partially the intention, though. I disagree that it is inherently anti-strategy however. Planning your invasions around where there are supply hubs feels very strategic to me - finding myself fighting an entire operation over securing a bridge was one of my highlights of alpha testing.

Fighting over the supply network is very cool - by far the best feature of the expansion, by some margin, even with all of its quirks, hiccups and "who knows what's going on, it would be nice if the game told me" moments :)

Above all, I will reiterate that being under 100% supply satisfaction for a unit should not be considered a failure, unlike previous iterations of the game. This is something I want to work on telegraphing a little better.

If this is the case (and it's a reasonable case for it to be), I'd suggest reworking the notification system, and dialling back attrition based on supply, but tell players (like it used to pre-NSB) how much attrition is being taken in a way that makes sense so players can make informed decisions. Right now, we get a supply ratio and are left to guess at the meaning. With no indication of what it actually means, how is a player supposed to know whether 90% supply ratio is terrible, or a 30% ratio is cool? Perhaps we need a new supply warning for when it's below 65% (or another number - I'm still far too early to have any idea of the impact of sub-100%) - but the UI is fighting against the notion you're promoting here - it tells people to worry as soon as it drops below 100% (as best I can tell).

As a rule of thumb, don't worry too much unless you have divisions that have a red exclamation mark next to a red low-supply icon.

We should be told this in-game, not have to hunt in a forum for something that is still incredibly vague in terms of the actually understanding what's going on - what does a red exclamation mark mean beyond "Arheo told me to worry if you see one?"

We don't usually update wikis ourselves (these are community curated), but I'll see if I can get some exact info put down somewhere.

The issue here is that even if I wanted to update the wiki (and I do, but not until I have much more time with the game), oodles of info isn't available to the player as to how it works. Maybe it's hidden in the game files, but expecting new players or wiki updaters to backward-engineer their gameplay from the files isn't exactly user-friendly.

They do, in a way. Having a max-level railway connection from capital -> hub, increases the range of that hub considerably. Having railways themselves propagate supply is not something we will do, though.

It would be incredibly helpful if there was some indication as to how far each 'intervention' to increase supply-hub range would supply, before implementation - in my game, I'm busy wildly over-capitalising Murmansk in an attempt to ensure decent supply along the border.
 
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Maybe you should add this information on the supply tooltip. I always thought building railways provide more supply but turns out its not.

An easy mistake to make - the Paradox-promoted video tutorial of the logistics system infers as much.
 
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It does both

I think they mean building railways without hubs - I agree that increasing the railway level all the way back to the capital increases hub distribution (although by how much is something I'm completely at a loss to understand, before or after building them, without making before-and-after spreadsheets of hub supply in province and comparing the two, which I haven't done yet :p ). In that video, the presenter builds railways without hubs in a context that could easily be inferred to mean they would provide supply - when they don't.
 
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It is mostly semantics. The supply hub can be assumed to distribute supply, yeah.

Hubs can support a maximum draw based on the rail connection to them. Let's say 15.

They also distribute a maximum flow value to the provinces around them, which falls off with range (affected by terrain and other factors). This is to prevent cliffs, add some organic tactical gameplay, and avoid over-stacking. This number is the one you see in the province tooltips around a hub.

Once this capacity is used up, additional units in that province cannot receive supply (or the draw will be averaged), and no more supply will be drawn from the node.

To effectively overstack node capacity is actually quite hard:

View attachment 777880

If I stacked all those units in one of the provinces, most of them would start starving, and the hub just wouldn't be able to supply them all. Consider it a localised version of throughput.

It doesn't really work as a localized version of throughput when the hub can't supply them all standing on the hub itself. And it's very easy to hit that limit, basically meaning you have to spread your units around constantly to avoid overdoing supply. See attached screenshot where a hub with over 28 supply throughput is refusing to give more than 3.8 supply to units sitting directly on top of it.

And if you want to pack them into an area the most efficiently you have to micromanage it carefully, because the AI will do an absolutely horrible job of it if they're given a front assignment. Nevermind if they're not on a front assignment and you actually want to cluster them in a region for, say, a naval invasion (launching or landing) or training or something.

I really preferred the old system where an area had x supply and all that mattered was if the number of units in that area required more than x, not what provinces they were specifically in.
 

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It doesn't really work as a localized version of throughput when the hub can't supply them all standing on the hub itself. And it's very easy to hit that limit, basically meaning you have to spread your units around constantly to avoid overdoing supply. See attached screenshot where a hub with over 28 supply throughput is refusing to give more than 3.8 supply to units sitting directly on top of it.

And if you want to pack them into an area the most efficiently you have to micromanage it carefully, because the AI will do an absolutely horrible job of it if they're given a front assignment. Nevermind if they're not on a front assignment and you actually want to cluster them in a region for, say, a naval invasion (launching or landing) or training or something.

I really preferred the old system where an area had x supply and all that mattered was if the number of units in that area required more than x, not what provinces they were specifically in.
Well you see with a proper system there's no arbitrary throughput limit on how supply works, you have supply if you have enough supply in the area, and the trucks or 'horses' to distribute them efficiently, which lowers the further away you are from a depot, so in this photo you'd actually be the most supplied sitting on the depot. Unfortunately we have over simplification, arbitrary mechanics, and supply being unpredictably spawned where it shouldn't be, and lacking where it shouldn't be, such as on the literal port and hub in your photo.
 
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Well you see with a proper system there's no arbitrary throughput limit on how supply works, you have supply if you have enough supply in the area, and the trucks or 'horses' to distribute them efficiently, which lowers the further away you are from a depot, so in this photo you'd actually be the most supplied sitting on the depot. Unfortunately we have over simplification, arbitrary mechanics, and supply being unpredictably spawned where it shouldn't be, and lacking where it shouldn't be, such as on the literal port and hub in your photo.

It's not actually using the port, mind you, instead preferring to move all the supplies by rail from Korea. Though the game somewhat arbitrarily picking ports for convoys was something it did before, so I don't consider that an issue with the new system (and to be fair, I'm not sure there'd be a good way to handle it intelligently short of letting the player set up convoys themselves which would be pretty micro-y).
 
Seems like a simple solution would be to only allow one active supply hub per state no?

For example, a second supply hub could only buff the ability of the first to spread out incoming supply or serve as a fallback, but wouldn't increase total supply available.
I feel the issue, in most of these examples i posted relates to overlapping supply hubs being able to supply one another and the same tile at efficiencies identical to as if the other supply hub was not present.

What doesn't make sense to ME. Is that adding another supply hub further away, will somehow increase available supply closer to the capitol.
I.e train travels 100km down the rail, and delivers 20 supply.
Make another hub a further 100km, and send supply on trucks from that hub to the first one... for another 15 supply.

Quirks in no particular order:
Port of Alexandria has a supply value of 6,12 from the hub (itself) + 2,60 from the state = 10,89 (with 50 trucks)
Putting 1 supply hub in the Matrouh desert has a supply value of 2,70 from the state + 10,22 from the hub = 12,97 (also 50 trucks)

Now i understand how the system works, unintuitively. The Port of Alexandria has a supply connection with the capitol of 25. Then the level 1 rail to Matrouh has a cap of 15. So in the logic of the game, it is entirely reasonable that sending supplies into the North African desert is easier than sending supplies to a major port (level 8 port)

So, i've been bitching and moaning enough. Making a fair amount of either unrealistic examples, or exceedingly rare examples. Just to showcase the issues with the system, in a hypothethical setting.

However, the Brittish Empire deciding to extend its supply reach in the North African desert via the creation of a railway line and a supply hub as entirely reasonable. The Italians have been engaging in Colonial warfare threatening Imperial possessions from the South. It has been decided to send army, navy and air power to the region in order to act as a rapid response force should the Italians attempt any military action. As such, an upgrade to the existing logitstics network has been authorized.

Concrete proposals:
1. Significantly increase the amount of trucks you can attach to a supply depot. 0/25/50 is too low, and too limiting. Possibly allow logistics elements to be directly assigned to an army. This should not be infinite however, i understand that a hub can only process so many vehicles each day.

2. Add levels to supply hubs, increasing the amount of a) trains they can service each day b) trucks/mules/horses they can service each day. 20 000 IC cost is too prohibitively expensive to construct for all nations, except the largest. The Brittish Empire can barely justify constructing a single supply hub, in order to dissuade another major power. But the current usefulness of a single hub, justifies the 20k IC cost.

3. Tiles should not be able to receive supply from multiple hubs simultaneously UNLESS the amount of trucks utilized at the closest hub hits the cap. Then a second hub can be used if within range. Make the logistics network actually rely on the trains, trucks and transport airplanes as a ''numbers available'' game. I'm getting the vibes that supplies are teleporting here, assigning more troops should require the use of more trucks.

4. Using trucks should counteract a negative modifier, not increase the modifier to a positive value. What i mean by this is that, if Salt Lake City receives 20 supply each day to it's supply hub from railway. That is 100% of the positive supply that the tile can receive. The decision to use trucks should in no way, make it possible to increase the available supply on top of the hub beyond that 20. The trucks should instead counteract the range loss modifier in tiles petruding outwards. Infrastructure should affect the efficiency of trucks, and to a lesser extent animals.

In the current game, Alexandria has a supply of 8,69. Which can be increased to 10,89 using trucks. Which is odd to me, since Alexandria is the supply hub and should see no range loss. But assigning trucks to it, implies that it does lose supply to range. Make the base 10,89 with or without trucks, have troops standing on top of it use 0 trucks as they just grab the supplies directly from the port.

5. Make it impossible to use trucks in certain places, and add a cost modifier to railway tracks. It should not be possible to create inexpensive supply networks in Papua / West Papua which combined has only Jungle and Mountain tiles, except for a single plains tile. I like the idea of supply truck Attrition, keep it in. But add modifiers which reduce efficiency of trucks as well scaling to -100% on Jungle tiles. I.e you can only use horses, mules and other pack animals in certain regions.

Using bogus numbers to put an example.

Forest tile:
Supply Truck Efficiency -20%, now if you assign 100 trucks. It would be as if you only assigned 80 to a plains tile.
Supply truck Attrition +20%, as it is written in game now.
Railroad cost modifier +30%, self explanatory
Supply hub cost modifier +30%, self explanatory

Keeping in mind, if you wish to add any modifiers INCREASING supply hub costs. It would have to be combined with dividing hubs into different levels. So that, you can construct a level 1 or 2 hub on North Borneo to support a push overland. At 20k IC cost, this would be impossible in practice.

Maybe add some national spirit flavor. Italy for example was very much focused on it's mountainous borders with France and Austria/Germany in military thinking in the 20s and 30s. Add some bonus to mountain supply efficiency, which partially counteracts the negative but not completely. The UK has ''Service overseas'' which can affect desert/jungle supply. Finland can have some bonus in forest, Deep snow and snow. Add a ''supply on core state'' modifier, if for no other reason than to allow moders to mod.

6. Air Supply... it's pointless to comment on a non-functional part of your game. It's bugged. Fix it.

7. I'm not sure if port levels matter much, or at all. Investigating, but it looks as if port existing and port has access to capitol is the only checks. But there is no level of port check, i could be wrong.

8. I dislike access to capitol being the only way to acquire supplies. I see the ''Allied supply'' button, great thinking on that part. But if it is not prohibitively resource intensive on the game speed. Any victory point should be able to form the basis of a supply network. Say for example London is encircled, Brittish Africa/Middle east actually has 32,4 supply in the current iteration of the game. From Infrastructure, Population and Victory points. And should be able to move that around, provided the logistics network can handle it. Actually, local supply should be preffered. Maybe some way for the player to decide?

I see Alexandria has a civilian factory as well. Which does NOT add to Alexandria supply? But instead adds it to the capitol London supply? I think this is odd. It should add to Alexandria, reducing the amount of convoys needed to be sent from London.
 
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If I stacked all those units in one of the provinces, most of them would start starving, and the hub just wouldn't be able to supply them all. Consider it a localised version of throughput.
Which is very unintuitive. Why would moving further away form the supply hub. The location which receives all of the trains, make it easier to supply the army? The complete opposite should be the case no? If the army is struggling with supply, it should move closer to the supply hubs.
 
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You will notice I tend to stop responding to threads when people lack manners. There is really no reason that constructive criticism has to be delivered with bile.
 
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Which is very unintuitive. Why would moving further away form the supply hub. The location which receives all of the trains, make it easier to supply the army? The complete opposite should be the case no? If the army is struggling with supply, it should move closer to the supply hubs.

It isn't related to moving closer or further away; it is related to spreading out. In reality this is the way the player uses the system. You don't stack everyone on one tile, you spread out, either over defensive lines or front lines.
 
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You will notice I tend to stop responding to threads when people lack manners. There is really no reason that constructive criticism has to be delivered with bile.
If my posts come off as hostile or full of bile I assure you that's not intended. Several changes in NSB are not what I was hoping for, and I want to offer constructive criticism in the hope they might still be reconsidered, but I'm still going to give the expansion a shot.

Right now the only thing keeping me from playing is whatever is causing the bugs with docked fleets and supplies, and I believe that one's already acknowledged as a bug and hopefully will be fixed in the near future.
 
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I'm actually mostly happy with the new system. There's a few issues to be ironed out (air supply being both extremely OP and able to be looped is a big one, as well as navies not interacting with the system properly) but overall the system makes reasonable sense.

There's a few criticisms I'm seeing here.

1. "Supply" is an infinite resource that magically appears in supply hubs (as long as they have connection to the capital). The amount of "supply" available is only limited by the quality of the connection to the capital (and other factors like state population and VPs).

2. Supply throughput isn't modeled - e.g. a railroad doesn't have a maximum of supply carried. A railroad with two supply hubs on it can supply then both equally efficiently.

3. Supply hubs do not actually provide their supply maximum unless divisions are stacked in every tile they cover - as shown by Bremen here.
It doesn't really work as a localized version of throughput when the hub can't supply them all standing on the hub itself. And it's very easy to hit that limit, basically meaning you have to spread your units around constantly to avoid overdoing supply. See attached screenshot where a hub with over 28 supply throughput is refusing to give more than 3.8 supply to units sitting directly on top of it.

And if you want to pack them into an area the most efficiently you have to micromanage it carefully, because the AI will do an absolutely horrible job of it if they're given a front assignment. Nevermind if they're not on a front assignment and you actually want to cluster them in a region for, say, a naval invasion (launching or landing) or training or something.

I really preferred the old system where an area had x supply and all that mattered was if the number of units in that area required more than x, not what provinces they were specifically in.
The supply hub maximum is - for some reason - distributed across every tile in its range instead of being adjusted based on unit positioning, which has the appearance of making empty provinces draw supply. To fully use a supply hub's supply maximum, units must be stationed all over the place.



My takes on all three of these are as follows:
I really don't see the value in simulating transported goods. In a game with such a wide strategic layer, it doesn't add anything to the player decision making - which is really how we should be designing features, not as a deep simulation first (despite how much I love simulation within grand strategy).

The first one is just plain wrong. Simulating the flow of transported goods is a fool's errand, but you said here that you don't really care about the production of said goods either.

Overall, it seems you may want the system to represent the productive supply issues faced by the major powers in ww2. That is not unreasonable, but it is already partially covered by the equipment subsystem. It is also not what we set out to create with this supply system - here we built a system to represent logistical supply concerns with key interaction points for the player.

Production and logistics are the same thing; the best supply & logistics system in the world is useless if there's nothing to deliver. Supply (food and munitions in HOI4, it seems like) should be a resource in the same way that equipment is, that is produced, added to a national pool, and then delivered using the supply system.



As others have correctly pointed out, this is a system where bottlenecks and capacity matter, not the individual movement of any given quantity of supply. On a strategic level, tracking the production and consumption of supply from N producers (cities, per your example) would be chaotic, as well as computationally prohibitive.
This is correct, modelling traffic/rail network flow in HOI4 would be prohibitively expensive - and in the same breath, people are complaining about lag...I don't think people realize they're asking for a solution to a problem that's been giving compsci folks fits for decades.



The last one - that supply hubs don't distribute their supplies to where they're needed - is just a consequence of both a new system and rather opaque tooltipping in my opinion, though I do find it a bit silly that supply hub province locations don't seem to have substantially higher supply capacity than even neighboring provinces.



There's a few other things that are closer to nitpicks:
1. Motorization costs for a supply hub are flat (0-50-100), not based on supply drawn from that hub. This one is pretty indefensible - using 0 supply should mean I use 0 trucks, while pulling 25 supply with however many divisions should use hundreds if not thousands of trucks. This is something I don't expect to see fixed, honestly, but it is quite silly as it is - motorizing the entire Eastern Front's supply columns would have taken hundreds of thousands of trucks, not the ~1500 it takes currently. The Red Ball Express (which turned out to still not be able to supply the Allied armies) used six thousand 2½ ton trucks for supply purposes only - granted, they didn't have access to railways...

2. No option to turn on motorization globally - not really a major issue but would still be nice to have.

3. Motorization doesn't use manpower or fuel for some reason - ties into #1 with mass motorization being far too easy to accomplish.

4. If there are penalties to motorization based on terrain I'm having trouble seeing what they are. If there aren't any, there definitely should be some!

5. Supply hubs are really expensive - as they should be. But some way of building a cheaper, temporary, or less efficient version of a supply hub would be nice.
 
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If my posts come off as hostile or full of bile I assure you that's not intended. Several changes in NSB are not what I was hoping for, and I want to offer constructive criticism in the hope they might still be reconsidered, but I'm still going to give the expansion a shot.

Not aimed in your direction, no worries. And yes, I'm fully willing to admit that there is always room for improvement. Game development is just one large series of compromises, after all. Keep the feedback coming!
 
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There's a few other things that are closer to nitpicks:
1. Motorization costs for a supply hub are flat (0-50-100), not based on supply drawn from that hub. This one is pretty indefensible - using 0 supply should mean I use 0 trucks, while pulling 25 supply with however many divisions should use hundreds if not thousands of trucks. This is something I don't expect to see fixed, honestly, but it is quite silly as it is - motorizing the entire Eastern Front's supply columns would have taken hundreds of thousands of trucks, not the ~1500 it takes currently. The Red Ball Express (which turned out to still not be able to supply the Allied armies) used six thousand 2½ ton trucks for supply purposes only - granted, they didn't have access to railways...

2. No option to turn on motorization globally - not really a major issue but would still be nice to have.

3. Motorization doesn't use manpower or fuel for some reason - ties into #1 with mass motorization being far too easy to accomplish.

1. Demand based usage was actually something we had for a long time. It was awful for the player, though. Try keeping track of your truck usage when it spikes based on location, passive demand, offensives, defensives, et al. It was impossible to plan for.

2. The army setting was the intended way of using that. Honestly if the answer is simply to turn this on globally, it may be better just to turn off motorization entirely.

3. Yes, on the radar to look into as a possible balance change.
 
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It isn't related to moving closer or further away; it is related to spreading out. In reality this is the way the player uses the system. You don't stack everyone on one tile, you spread out, either over defensive lines or front lines.

For what it's worth it is how I use the system, as when I want to move a lot of units to an area I tend to box select and then strategic move them there, and individually dividing them up into a dozen smaller formations with different destinations is a lot of micro. Sure, if I'm moving them onto a front they'll soon end up split up, but if I just won a war and am moving them back to supply, or just want to stick them somewhere and train until they're ready for the front lines, or similar, then now I need to do a lot of micromanagement I didn't before.

There are also cases where it's not possible to divide up a force into a lot of smaller units, like a naval fleet (Which can only be stationed at a port, and it's unusual I'd have a dozen ports along the same coast) or planes (ditto with airbases).
 
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